07 January 1999, 869 words
Hyperbole is one of the few cultural characteristics the West Indian peoples truly share. This is because we also share the same insecurities. But one of our most frequent boasts in the anglophone Caribbean seems to be an unexaggerated truth: that, given our relatively small population of five million, we have produced an unusually large number of top-class achievers. In sport, we have given the world champion sprinters, footballers, cricketers, and karatekas. In the intellectual field, two Nobel Prize winners have emerged from these former British colonies and one novelist who is described as a writer's writer. We have also produced an absurd number of superb musicians and composers.
But, if we are indeed statistically anomalous in this way, there must be concrete reasons for it. My hypothesis is that there are unique genetic factors, plus cultural traits which are specific to our colonially-constructed societies, which could account for the unusual number of high achievers coming out of the Caribbean.
The genetic factors apply mostly to the African descendants who make up the major racial group in the region. Historians estimate that about twenty million Africans were brought to the Caribbean in the 400 years of the slave trade. In From Columbus to Castro, Dr. Eric Williams estimated that about thirty percent of the human cargo died in the Middle Passage. Once on the islands, the mortality rate continued to be high. For every 56 Africans who left Africa for the West Indies, records Williams, 44 had died at the end of three years.
Now there has never been any other group of people in known history who went through such a harsh winnowing experience. The result was a culturally enforced process of natural selection which, just like the Darwinian process among the lower species, ensured that only the healthiest and most intelligent individuals survived. We can see the results of this culling even today: it is not accidental that so many young black men have such naturally fine physiques or that so many young black women are so shapely. (Of course, poor lifestyle habits often cancel these advantages by the time they hit their 30s.) This may explain, though only partially, why our region has produced so many world champions in sports.
I say partially, because achievement also depends on what are called temperamental factors. East Indian descendants in the Caribbean have contributed to this statistical anomaly, but I believe cultural and psychological factors, rather than genetic selection, more account for this. Self-selected immigrant groups often progress far more quickly than the equivalent socio-economic groups of the society to which they have emigrated. This may be partly because immigrants go to a new country with the specific intention of creating better lives for themselves and their children. So the feeling of "alienation" which Indian descendants in the Caribbean experienced may have actually helped them to progress academically and economically.
What is true for physical achievements is truer for intellectual ones. It is pretty well established that intelligence is genetically inherited. But intelligence cannot be precisely measured, and even the most sophisticated tests cannot predict achievement based on IQ. What researchers are fairly sure about is that most intellectual achievers will have an IQ rating of at least 120. But a person with an IQ of 180, say, will not necessarily be a better physicist or novelist or economist than a person with a mere 130 rating. (Marilyn Vos Savant, who has the world's highest measured IQ, makes her living answering trivial queries on various topics in a magazine column. Einstein, on the other hand, was always a mediocre mathematician.)
This is probably why genius and creativity are not heritable. And, this being the case, it may be why our colonial societies produced so many high-achievers: because our skewed economic development, and the peculiar prejudices that shaped us socially, were in themselves factors which strongly motivated our genetically gifted individuals to achieve - even if the motivation, as in the case of V.S. Naipaul, was mainly to "get away." But these temperamental factors are also a key to achievement in the sporting arenas. CLR James has argued convincingly in Beyond a Boundary that the West Indies cricket team became world-beaters because cricket had sociopolitical meaning for both the cricketers and their public. The South African whitewash, and the generally poor performance of the team despite its outstanding individual talents, seems to support James's thesis.
Good genes, talent and ambition are necessary in order to excel. But they are not enough in themselves. One must love what one does, even if that love is based partly on a desire for acclaim. Michael Jordan doesn't play basketball or Stephen King write novels just for for the multi-million-dollar contracts. There must be a love for the thing-in-itself. Often, the seed of such love is pure escapism. And that is our cross here in the West Indies: that we want to escape that which has made us. Our history has created certain limitations, but it has just as surely given us certain advantages. Our challenge, as societies, is to use the latter to overcome the former. Only then will this region truly start to define world civilization - if you'll excuse my hyperbole.
Copyright ©1999 Kevin Baldeosingh